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I haven't followed the details very closely because I don't care about Java, but the whole story is basically about Sun not playing nice with Open Source people. One of the problems is them refusing J2EE labelling on any Open Source implementation, the other is iirc not giving sufficient guarantees that specs can have OSS implementations without paying fees.

If they had wanted to do something to help Microsoft kick them out into oblivion with.NET, they probably couldn't have found a better way.

Sun has put themselves in a precarious position WRT Java. First, they want to encourage a healthy industry of commercial Java technology (which presumably feeds back into Sun through licensing fees). OTOH, they want to encourage widespread adoption of Java (which tends to be co-incident with open source implementations).

This is the problem that Bjarne came across with C++. First, he was living in a world of proprietary C compilers and compiler technology; one relatively accurate measure of success for C++ the language was the size and revenue of the C++ tools industry. OTOH, one of the biggest problems with the adoption of C++ was the various vendor-interoperability issues that came from not having a de facto standard for C++ (like Perl's single implementation as a de facto standard for Perl).

Whatever happens, it'll certainly be an interesting chapter in the history of the industry...